In an interview with British newspaper "The Independent", the economist and Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has criticized the banks for the "shame" to say now that they have no money to lend to small businesses or to whom need a mortgage when premiums were paid "obscene" of an amount of 33,000 million dollars in U.S. only.
He denounced that the U.S. government has been reduced to the role of trash for so-called "toxic assets" from banks and wondered "why George W. Bush and Barack Obama have spent so much money to help banks and so little to assist homeowners? ". "The current crisis has seen how governments assumed a new role: assuming risks of last resort. When private markets were on the verge of bankruptcy, all risk is transferred to the government," said Stiglitz in The Independent as slogan for Gara newspaper.
"The safety net should be there to protect individuals, but extended to corporations in the belief that the consequences of not doing so would be too horrible. And once extended, will be difficult to withdraw" he said. He added that companies "if they are sufficiently large and their eventual bankruptcy constitutes a sufficient threat to the economy or have enough political influence" know that governments are going to "take the risk of an eventual bankruptcy."
According to the economic adviser to former President Bill Clinton, banks have actually tried to "place the tip of a gun against our temples" to tell us that unless we keep them in the conditions they set, "they will kill the entire economy."
Stiglitz called it "a fantasy" to believe that "the market is someone you can argue that this is intelligent, rational and well meaning." We know the market is subject to irrational optimism and pessimism, and that is vindictive, "he said.
"I feel the anger in Greece and other countries attacked (by speculators) by the fact that the same financial markets that led to the crisis now punish governments that borrowed heavily to rescue them," complained Stiglitz.
In his new book "Freefall" (Free Fall), the economist accused the bankers who have demonstrated ability to curb many of the necessary regulatory reforms. "Visa and MasterCard, they found it easier to give credit cards to every living creature to do what they had to do: analyze the creditworthiness" of applicants, he wrote.

(www.180.com.uy, 10 February 2010)